How to build and submit sitemaps

How to build and submit sitemaps

Search Engine is an essential factor to consider when designing your website. It is a practice that drives web users to your website through search engine results. It is a way to ensure your web page is indexed higher in the search engine results. One way to ensure that your business website is search engine optimized is through designing and submitting a sitemap. A sitemap is essential planning to a new site. It is a virtual representation of how you want your website to look. It is a diagram to aid you to develop your website.

Additionally, it helps you figure out how web users surf for information over the internet. It is a critical step in developing a functional and usable site to serve the needs of your customers. A typical sitemap should include all the pages of your website, showing users how to access each of them, beginning from the homepage onto all the subpages. It is a useful web development tool for web designers and non-designers as well. Sitemaps help you simplify the daunting web development process through the organization of content and elimination of additional webpages and content alike. The following are the steps for creating an XML sitemap and submitting it on Google.

Building a sitemap

Building a sitemap involves essential steps that each web developer should follow to attain the intended goal with a sitemap. There is no particular way of creating a sitemap. However, in this article, I will guide you on building an excellent XML sitemap. An XML sitemap is a great way to ensure your site is listed, crawled, and indexed correctly by the search engines.

Know what you’re looking for

A sitemap is a list of the pages making up your site. However, this does not necessarily mean every single page should be on the sitemap. A sitemap should include the most crucial or informative pages on your website. It should certainly include the pages that should be in Google’s Index. For instance, a login page or page with a post-purchase message for customers can be left out when building the sitemap to improve on clarity.

Gather the pages of your website

This step involves collecting all your website’s URLs. The easiest and the most efficient way to obtain the URLs are using the standard web crawler tools available online. These tools help you gather the URLs quickly by creating a list of URLs within a short time. Alternatively, you can perform a human crawl whereby you fetch the URLs manually. This is a very effective method especially if your site is not vast. Besides, you get to learn the user-friendliness and usability of your website.

Code the URLs

After you already have the list of your website’s URLs, the next step is formatting the URLs using appropriate XML tags. This requires using a code editor to generate an XML file.

Perfume a validation check to your sitemap

Validation of a sitemap is a crucial step. This is a process for checking the syntax of your sitemap structure and code to ensure it is free from any errors. It involves using online validation tools where you post the .XML file to generate a report of any errors present.

Add the sitemap to the root

In this step, you will add the sitemap file into the root folder of your site. This can be quickly done locally using the file transfer protocol. Adding the sitemap file into your root folder makes it accessible and can be located through your site. This is a common practice for most websites.

Add the sitemap to the Robots(.TXT)

The robots.txt file is a file that contains a simple text file that includes instructions for the web crawler visiting your website. The data should be stored on the root folder of your site. This is a practice that has been proven to work by many successful websites and top SEOs.

Submit it

Once you have collected and gathered, tagged, validated, and added the sitemap, the last and the most critical step is submitting the sitemap to a search engine. I will show you how to submit your sitemap to Google because it is one of the most used search engines on the internet today. Submitting your sitemap may improve the indexing of your site! Thus, it is crucial that you do it right. First, you have to set up a Google Search Console account set, then follow the following steps.

Submitting a sitemap to Google

Submitting a sitemap is not as complicated as building them. The process involves the following steps.

Create and sign in to Google search console

Select your website in the sidebar

Click on the index to expand the section then click on sitemaps

Remove invalid or outdated

Add/enter your sitemap URL in the textbox that appears

Click submit

Through the various outlined steps, you are guaranteed that your website will be ranked and indexed accordingly on the google search engine organic results.